Great are the Words of Isaiah Pt. 1
ft. Avraham Gileadi
Meghan Farner: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Latter-Day Disciples podcast. I am so grateful and excited to have, as my guest today, Avraham Gileadi. Avraham was born in the Netherlands during World War II. During the war, his father’s Dutch underground organization helped a New Zealand pilot escape to England, and this led to the family emigrating to New Zealand in 1950. In 1968, Avraham emigrated to Israel, where he learned Hebrew, attended rabbinical school and studied Jewish analytical methods. In 1973, he moved to the United States, married and raised a family of nine children. He graduated with a PhD in Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern Studies under the tutelage of Professor Roland K Harrison of Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada, with Professor Hugh Nibley as chairman. For his doctoral thesis, A Bifid Division of the Book of Isaiah, he analyzed a complex literary structure in the Book of Isaiah that radically impacts the book’s interpretation. During his PhD program, he translated the text of Isaiah into Modern English and published it with analyzes of Isaiah’s literary patterns discovered during a decade of postdoctoral research. He has several publications all centered around the Book of Isaiah and its central time and message. I know one of the things that really excited me when I first found Avraham was a quote from Professor Hugh Nibley that said that Dr. Gileadi is the only LDS scholar he knew of who is thoroughly competent to teach the words of Isaiah. Avraham also helped found the Isaiah Institute, which was created in the year 2000 by the Hebraeus Foundation, to disseminate the message of the prophet Isaiah. His groundbreaking research and analysis of the Book of Isaiah provides the ideal medium for publishing Isaiah’s end time message to the world. You can find Avraham at IsaiahInstitute.com, or Isaiahexplained.com, which is his Isaiah Translation. Avraham, thank you so much for joining me today.
Avraham Gileadi: Sure. Meghan, you’re most welcome. Looking forward to this.
Meghan Farner: You know, obviously we’re getting into Come Follow Me here and the Book of Isaiah specifically and as you are very well aware, this is a sealed book. This is a book that most members of the church have yet to unlock to find not just personal meaning, but the actual literal meaning: that was Isaiah’s meaning, I think. And so I wanted to invite you on to do– probably this is a two part episode– to really highlight many of the things that you have learned from Isaiah and what members can do to ensure that they are actually understanding the book of Isaiah, which is so important to our time. So I wanted to start with just a little bit more on your background and what the process was like for you in discovering those literary components that were mentioned in your biography to help unlock the words of Isaiah? What did that process look like for you?
Avraham Gileadi: Well, of course, Jesus makes it a commitment to search the words of Isaiah, and the word to use is, deliberately, I think. And it’s also a deliberate challenge for us and that we’re supposed to do it ourselves and not rely on somebody else to do it. And that includes anybody’s work on it. But there are certain literary keys that govern these words, literary structures and there are word links and keywords and code names and so forth and so those layers upon layers are in the book of Isaiah. But my first objective was to make available, as you mentioned, a translation that was actually understandable, which the King James is not. I don’t think anybody can really come to understand Isaiah using the King James. Unfortunately, even though many people revere it for its poetic value just fine. But it’s not the original Isaiah, it’s the Masseretic text in Hebrew. And these things came forth as Jesus said in The Book of Mormon in their purity from the Gentiles, from the Jews to the Gentiles. And so we have to go back and get a good translation. We believe in the Bible insofar as it’s translated correctly. And then Brigham Young said, “If anybody can do it better than the King James translators, he was obligated to do so.” So I took that upon myself as far as Isaiah was concerned, not that I’m anybody special or anything. Anybody can do this. And the idea is to get the sense across, the sense of the original meaning. And that’s so important with committees that do translations like the King James Committee. You know, they compromise in many instances and – for example, the word nest in Hebrew, it’s translated three different times, three different ways in the book of Isaiah by the King James Translators. We also have standard, banner, and ensign. And yet it’s a keyword. It’s a word that identifies a person. Two persons in fact, the king of Assyria and the servant are both identified as the inside that God raises out. One is an ensign that rallies the wicked nations of the world to conquer the world. And the other is the ensign that rallies the people of Zion to the safe place Zion. So, you can’t translate the three different ways or you do not know what it’s talking about. And so there are many keywords, like pseudonyms or aliases of persons in the Book of Isaiah. The main character is mainly the Lord himself and his end-time servant and the King of Assyria. A translation will give you a lot. Translation will give you at least the surface meaning. There are many literary structures that look like the forest compared to the trees. You’ve got to take all these literary considerations into account, otherwise you will not get the message. And yet it’s not that difficult, these are very simple literary discoveries. I did ten years of postdoctoral work, but my doctoral work, under the tutelage of Professor Harrison in Toronto, Toronto School of Theology, his colleague William Brownlee, had discovered a literary structure in the Dead Sea Scrolls of Isaiah that divided the book of Isaiah into two parts of 33 chapters each that parallel each other, and each half was divided to seven parts. And those seven parts in the first half paralleled the seven parts in the second half. So he had me analyze that for my PhD thesis, and that started uncovering just a wealth of knowledge and information of truth with divine truths and layers of truth in the book of Isaiah. And one thing the structure did–and I discovered other literary structures as well beyond those later on–was transposed the entire book of Isaiah into an end-time scenario. And when I discovered that, I had to totally revamp my understanding of the Book of Isaiah from what I knew previously. “Oh, this is really interesting. It’s historical and has got to do with us today.” Well, for one thing, Nephi quotes a lot of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. A third of Isaiah is quoted in the Book of Mormon. Since it is hard to engrave on these plates, it was very laborious, there had to be a really solid reason. And the reason is that whenever the Book of Mormon starts talking about either Nephi or Jacob, or Jesus himself in 3rd Nephi, then they start talking about the end-time or the the time of the fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah. They start quoting Isaiah first. Even Jesus himself quotes Isaiah at length. And it locates the entire prophecy of Isaiah in an end-time scenario as an end-time scenario or anyway as an end-time location or setting. But it’s also something I was taught in rabbinic school in Israel by Rabbi Goldstein. He said the book of Isaiah can be read on two levels. One is in their day, and one the end-time. And I said, “How do you know?” He said, “We don’t have proof that it’s a tradition among the Jews.” And so during that PhD analysis, I found the literary proof for that in the synchronous literary structure. The seven part structure, I call it the Book of Isaiah. And then I’ve discovered new things, new structures, and layered over those and layered over each other. And each one had its own message over and above what you read on the surface. And then I discovered these word links and keywords, code names, typologies. The whole Book of Mormon is just one big typology. It’s historical. It’s a typology based in history. It’s an allegory of the end time. And every time that I made a new discovery, I have to totally revamp my previous understanding of Isaiah. It was a huge process that took a long time. So finally, after ten years of that, I spent more years than that, of course, but after ten years of that, I felt competent for the first time to write a book about it. And that was The Literary Message of Isaiah. And that was followed by Isaiah Decoded. It’s one of my major works. And then several other books showing the literary keys to analyzing. And that work’s been continuing to the present day. So that’s basically how I did it, Meghan. I was given a research grant by BYU. And I had a research room on the fifth floor of the Harold B. Lee Library and that’s where I labored on and on discovering things every day. I’d make new discoveries and write it all up and try to figure it all out, how it all interrelated to each other, because that was not an easy task. That is now a lot simpler for the average reader and nobody could be expected to do that in a lifetime. The Lord is not asking everybody to do that in their lifetime because they don’t have time to do that. I was able to do it and publish it and so it’s the service that’s there now for people to immediately start understanding Isaiah. And it’s so immediate, so simple to do. And anybody who starts in on it starts seeing things for the first time in a completely different way than we’ve been taught. And you yourself are in the process of doing that, aren’t you?
Meghan Farner: Yeah. Yeah. And I was going to share a little bit about my experience because I think that I had always felt intuitively or through whisperings of the spirit that Isaiah was important for our time, too. And I think that most people who, if you even so much as choose not to skip over those chapters in the Book of Mormon, the Spirit will tell you that. The Spirit will tell you that this is relevant even if you don’t quite understand how. And so I think I always had that foundational belief that Isaiah and the Book of Isaiah was important for understanding our times. But it wasn’t until I really embarked on my own serious spiritual journey that I was led to the Isaiah Institute earlier this year. And just like you said, I started out reading many of the ancillary resources that you have written about the typography, about the code names, about the literary structures, about the Old Testament historical events that Isaiah uses as a type for future events. And even just reading those things, my eyes, as you said, were almost immediately opened. And it was really amazing and not just to the Book of Isaiah, but to all Scripture, because one of the things that I’ve learned from you and through my own studies of Isaiah is that all of the other prophets look to Isaiah and they used his writings, his patterns as their own pattern, and they adopted that and applied his methodology to what they wrote too. And so now I read the Book of Mormon and I see code names and code words in the Book of Mormon that are talking about the same things that Isaiah was talking about. And so it’s been so exciting for me not just to have a better understanding of what we’re going to be experiencing here in the end-times, which is obviously very significant in and of itself, but to have my eyes open to a completely new set of scriptures. It feels like finally the word of God has come alive.
Avraham Gileadi: You’re so right about the signs of the Book of Mormon that are Isaiah like. The core fabric of so many prophecies in The Doctrine & Covenants, and then the Book of Mormon also. The Doctrine & Covenants is full of Isaiah. And if you didn’t know Isaiah, you’d not realize perhaps that Joseph Smith was using the words of Isaiah to say what he’s saying. In terms of the Book of Mormon, you really have to understand Isaiah first in order to understand the Book of Mormon or even to understand Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, because it uses the King James version, which was already translated. And so translation is a whole different subject. You know, Joseph Smith read the words in the Urim and Thummim or the Seer Stone so he didn’t actually translate it himself. Somebody on the other side of the veil no doubt, had a knowledge of the languages, and Joseph Smith would simply read it off to the scribe or Oliver Cowdery or whoever, and he would write it down. And then a new line would appear. So Joseph Smith was not really exercising his mental faculties. He was simply reading. And so that raises the question of why would the King James version of Isaiah be used? Well, some academics argue, well, that must be the very best translation. No, it’s not. Not even close to the best translation of Isaiah, but it was the existing translation of Joseph Smith’s day and to translate it afresh might have caused controversy or something, like I said, it’s a different subject. For whatever reason, they use the King James translation, it is the standard translation of the day and still is the one used in the church, even though other languages in the church use a different translation. But Isaiah really is the key to understanding the Book of Mormon itself. You come to all those wars in the middle of the Book of Mormon. In the Book of Alma there’s 4 to 5 wars that are all part of the same scriptural pattern when you analyze the different components of those wars. And there’s 7 to 10 exoduses in the Book of Mormon. And when you put all those Exodus side by side, beginning with Lehi’s exodus out of Jerusalem and so forth, then they have common elements, and those common elements create an exodus pattern. And those four or five wars create a war pattern. And those patterns are straight out of the book of Isaiah, because Isaiah talks about and prophesied a new exodus of the House of Israel, the Jews, the Ten Tribes of Israel, and the end time from the four directions in the new exodus out of Babylon, out of the World to Zion, and then the Assyrian Wars that all those chapters of Nephi quotes about God’s people, apostatizing, and then Assyria invading the promised land and turning the people captive. All of that is telling you that that’s an end-time scenario, as you intuitively felt and as I intuitively felt when I was younger. And as the rabbi would teach, it’s all part of an end-time scenario using history as an allegory. Knowing how Isaiah does it, then you understand why the Book of Mormon authors would be doing that kind of thing in the Book of Mormon? Because it says, what? How many times? At least half a dozen times that they wrote less than 100th what they could have written in the Book of Mormon from their history. So you have to ask, “Well, what are the criteria they use for including so little and excluding so much?” And what they excluded was something that did not follow the scriptural patterns. But what they included followed the scriptural patterns that repeat themselves in the end-time, just as Isaiah’s historical events repeat themselves in the end-time. So it gives you a totally different understanding of the Book of Mormon as well. It’s like the core fabric of which all of the other scriptures and prophecies interconnect. Look at Moses, The Doctrine of Covenants, you can go on and on; the other prophets they all somehow connect to Isaiah. Because it’s a beautiful thing no matter what time frame a prophet prophesied. They’re all part of one big fabric of scripture. When you start seeing those patterns, it’s a huge testimony that the Book of Mormon is true, that Isaiah’s true, and that all the Scriptures are true. And there’s so much there for us to learn.
Meghan Farner: Well, thank you. I wanted to go in a little bit to some of the more specific patterns that you discovered in Isaiah, and one that I personally have found so much significance in is what you call Isaiah’s spiritual ladder of humanity. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Avraham Gileadi: Yes, that is one of the key ideas from Isaiah, and nobody’s picked it up. One of the things I found in the Book of Isaiah is names– again, search the words of Isaiah–certain names like Jacob or Israel appear in pairs, which is common because Hebrew poetry consists of parallelism. So he’ll say here is he Jacob? Or something like that. And he will use Jacob and Israel as names in pairs. But at other times he’ll use the names Zion and Jerusalem in pairs. And so why is that? And so I started analyzing again, searching how he describes him, how he interacts with Jacob or Israel, and how we interact with Zion or Jerusalem. And I found that these are two different categories of people. One is Zion, the Jerusalem/Zion category is in a higher category than Jacob or Israel. And so I started looking around for others, other entities whom he describes, like God’s sons and daughters, and they’re on a higher level still: he has formed them, molded them, and wrote them for his own glory. They return in an exodus at the end of the world out of Babylon to Zion. So they are God’s elect, the equivalent of God’s elect. And then I discovered the Seraphim category, the equivalent of translated beings. And then there’s Jehovah himself. And below Jacob Israel is the Babylon category. And then there’s even the equivalent of Perdition. So there were these seven levels, seven spiritual levels of people that are there. And I started analyzing them and getting descriptions of them, what they do. And I found that these are the equivalent of spiritual levels on a ladder to heaven. And they tie into Jacob’s Ladder to Heaven in the Book of Genesis. But I found that all people’s relationships are–people relate to God through the terms of his covenants. It’s all related to God within the terms of covenants. That’s how God relates to people. He confines himself, he operates within the terms or the parameters of his covenants. And any interaction of God with anybody in the world, you can trace back to a covenant God made somewhere with somebody going all the way back to Adam and perhaps even pre-mortal covenants. But when people break the terms of their– of his– covenant, of course there are covenant curses or afflictions or things that happen and consequences that are unpleasant. When they keep the terms of this covenant, then there are blessings and wonderful things happen that elevate your life and so forth and the lives of others. So what I found was that the higher you go on the spiritual ladder. The covenants become higher covenants. And the laws of God or The Law and Word of God pertaining to each covenant. It goes from a lesser law to higher law to even a higher law. And of course, the Lord himself kept the Law of Godhood, the law of his Father in Heaven. Christ, when he atoned for this world’s transgression, he was performing that under a covenant contract with the Father and keeping his law on his level as Jesus shows. In order to do that, he had to descend below all, right? He descended below all in order to rise or ascend above all, to his father’s throne. He sits on the right hand of God. An express image of the Father and so forth. And so it is on lower spiritual levels. Anybody who has ascended from one level to the next has to be tested and tried to see if he remains loyal to God, if he keeps God’s law on that level of covenant keeping or not, and that within the terms of that particular covenant that he’s in. Like the Sinai covenant, is a collective covenant with Israel. It’s still as valid today as it was or It’s just transposed today to our church. And the congregation of the church. Anciently it was the congregation of Israel. And they made a covenant with Jehovah, the same as we make covenants of the Lord or Christ or Jehovah today. So you keep them on that level. But he’s going to see if you do. And when Jesus said, you know, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” Those commandments are the terms of his covenant that we keep as a church today and the gospel, the basic gospel–not the higher law of becoming perfect through the grace of God– and through that return that Jesus makes possible for us. So there is a terrestrial person who is a sinner and corresponds, for example, to the Jacob or Israel level in Isaiah, that category of people. But when they repent of their sins and renew the terms of their covenant with the Lord, with God, and start keeping his commandments, at some point, they will receive a remission of sins. They may do that in baptism when they first join, but if they sin again, then they will have to be forgiven. So that if they want to remain pure– then as King Benjamin said–that to retain a remission of their sins, keep it that way without sinning any more. And then if you want to ascend to the next, which is a celestial level; you are going from a telestial to a terrestrial which is a sinless level, which is called justification in Mormon doctrine. If you go to sanctification, which is that of the son/ servant category of God’s elect, of just men made perfect, The Church of the Firstborn. These are people who have not just not just been forgiven of their sins that they have repented of, but also overcome their iniquities, which are generational patterns or generational curses or habits that we’ve inherited from our ancestors that have to be expiated. So, there’s the difference between sin and iniquity which most people don’t understand. Iniquities are passed down from generations, to the third and fourth generation as mentioned in Deuteronomy and other scriptures. So they’re not the same as sin that you can repent of and be forgiven. For example, the people at the waters of Mormon, they are forgiven in the waters of baptism there. But the covenant curses of their former transgression still follow them around as the Lamanites put them into bondage and Amulonites enslaved them. Finally, the Lord released them, but they went through horrible afflictions and were put into bondage until they had not only been forgiven of their sins, which they had a long time ago at the Waters of Mormon, but they also became sanctified, purified and sanctified of all generational iniquities which were consequences of former transgressions. These were the aftereffects that followed them around until they became purified and sanctified and then at that point, the Lord released them from bondage. And this is what he does. This is a classic pattern of how it works. And as we also expiate our inequities by living a higher law, the higher law of consecration that we are given in the temple–which are actually the manifestation of the covenant that we then follow–then we go through our descent phases also until we become purified and sanctified and experience rebirth the second time on a celestial level. Each time you ascend a level, it’s called an ascent phase that follows the descent phase of being tried and tested every which way on that level. And finally, you ascend to the next level. But each time you ascend a level, the descent or descent phase being tested and tried is greater than the one before. And from that celestial level, you can extend it to a higher celestial level of translated beings, and go through the whole process again, but then the descent phase is again greater. But your ascent phase is also greater. And with each rebirth or ascent, you are also given a new name and a new commission to minister to others of God’s children. And the greatest of all, whom we follow as an exemplar of this is Jesus himself. And then he says to the three Nephites who are translated, being on the Seraph level. They will be even as he is. And he is even as the Father. It doesn’t mean that they inherit that immediately, but that their course is set to become as he is when, as Jesus says, he does nothing but what he’s seen the Father do. And he also tells the disciples, “Do the things that you have seen me do.” So this is how this whole hierarchy of ascending levels– such a beautiful paradigm–works. Everybody on the earth, whoever they are, including you and I, are somewhere on this ladder. And we can already tell which level we’re on and which level we should be striving for, Paul says we’re not saved in ignorance, nor are we exalted in ignorance. We know and we’ve attained a certain level because of the signs that go with it, and the promises of God that go with it. So yeah, this is one of the most beautiful aspects of the Book of Isaiah.
Meghan Farner: Yeah, it really is. And I think for me, the particular things that you talked about that have really been impactful for me, especially as I try to understand, what does it mean to actually be spiritually prepared for the second coming. That’s something that we talk about and we allude to, but we don’t really talk about what that actually looks like. What are the concrete concepts, what are the real characteristics that we all have that define us as in a good position to receive the Lord? So one of the first things that you talked about, you know, talking about those descent phases and that trial and tribulation and suffering is a part of this process of growth. And I love, again, the example of the Lord, that he descended below all things so that he could then ascend above all things. And I think one of the observations that I have is that as humans, we really love to avoid pain as much as possible. And obviously this doesn’t mean, you know, for the sake of spiritual growth that we go looking for pain, but it does mean that we should expect suffering to be a part of our journeys. And I think that perspective prepares us to better endure–rather than avoiding ever thinking about–that there are going to be painful things in our journey. And I think in the context of the last days, that’s really important as well to understand. There are hard things. Joseph Smith said that the Saints are not exempt from needing to go through those hard things in the last days, but having a better concept of what the purpose of those things can be, if we allow them to work for our good, I think is really powerful.
Avraham Gileadi: Right, Meghan. There are two things that really sanctify us, purify and sanctify us. And one of them is service, and the other one is suffering. And Apostle Paul has a lot to say about suffering and how even in Christ suffering he talks about how we should read about Paul’s suffering because it gives a lot of insight. The American culture is probably the worst in the world for trying to avoid pain by popping pills and so on–when you do damage to your body, insert toxins in your body that compromise our immune system and so forth over time. No we don’t go looking for pain, but if you really want to ascend to the highest spiritual levels you have to actually ask God to take you there. You have to make deals with God; to say, I’ll pay any price for that glory or that exaltation. Take me through it and he will. If he sees that you’re capable of it, he will take you through. It gets really gory and ugly sometimes, but it’s all more par for the course because during that process you learn to rise above the evils. And sometimes we see people in this world go through the most horrendous things. And often people may think, well, he deserves that. You know, he’s going through that because he’s done something bad. No. The only people who understand that process of descending and being tested and tried every which way on a particular level, spiritual level, are the people who actually go through it themselves. And they can relate to another because they’ve been through it whereas other people looking in from the outside don’t see that. You ask what it is that we can do to prepare for the end-time? And that is becoming purified and sanctified. So rather than run away from pain, let it happen. Jesus says, “Resist not evil.” Look at the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus gave. It starts off blessed are the poor in spirit and so forth. And then blessed are the pure in heart. Blessed are the peacemakers and finally he said, “Blessed are you who are spoken evil of falsely for my name sake, have comfort because so persecuted were the prophets which were before you.” Meaning that by that time you are on the level of a prophet which anybody can be, not a prophet of the church, but a prophet, nevertheless, who has the gift of prophecy. Because you have the gift of prophecy as dreams and visions. And so on. Inspiration. And then the Sons of Mosiah, they had that because they had dedicated their lives to God and God could use them to the degree that they had dedicated their lives to him. So you talked about preparing for the end-time. Well, that all has to do with what our role is supposed to be as Latter-Day Saints, and that’s different from the role of the House of Israel, because we Latter-Day Saints are never called the House of Israel in the Book of Mormon. The house of Israel is always defined, wherever they talk about it, as the Jews, first of all, and the Nephites and Lamanites and the Mulokites, of course, and the ten tribes, the last mystery, the ten tribes that are to return at the end of the world and Isaiah’s prophecies are all about that, all about the restoration of the House of Israel. In fact, Isaiah’s definition and the Book of Mormon’s definition of the Lord’s great and marvelous work is not the restoration of the priesthood and the gospel through the Prophet Joseph Smith. That was called the beginning of the commencement or the foundation of the great and marvelous work. That is not the great amount of work itself. Look it up. We jump to conclusions every time we read something. We think we know what it means. No, you have to analyze it. You have to search it and connect it. The real marvelous work according to Isaiah and the Book of Mormon is an end-time scenario; it is an end-time thing. It’s the restoration of the entire house of Israel, the Jews, the ten tribes of Israel, the natural branches of the house of Israel will be grafted into the olive tree again and become God’s covenant people. And we, in contrast with the House of Israel, we Latter-Day Saints are descendants of Ephraim. Yes but Ephraim assimilated into the Gentile nations, even if Jacob’s blessing of Ephraim, where he laid his right hand on Ephraim’s head and his left hand on Manasa’s head and said his offspring shall become the Ephraimites. The fullness of the Gentiles, mellow goyim and Hebrew is mistranslated into King James version as the multitude of nations, but mellow is the fullness of the Gentiles, is an expression that appears four times in the Scriptures, twice in the Book of Mormon, also in Romans 11. It has to do with the Ephraimites who assimilated into the Gentiles, became lost as Israelites, lost their Israelite identity. As Isaiah chapter seven, verse eight says Ephraim is a cake unturned or a half baked pancake. Ephraim has mingled among the nation’s. Ephraim is the half baked pancake. He’s assimilated into the Gentiles of nations. And now, since the restoration of the Gospel, those who believe the Book of Mormon and the Restoration, the Prophet Joseph Smith instituted and introduced to the Prophet Joseph Smith, they are the bleeding blood of the Gentiles, the fullness of the Gentiles, the seed of Ephraim. But we still identify as the Gentiles in The Book of Mormon, along with the other Gentiles, we inhabit the Americans. But specifically, we are called the fullness of the Gentiles. And look up those two instances in the Book of Mormon in your concordance. Look at those and see how the gospel is restored to the Gentiles and goes to the house of Israel, to the Jews, the Lamanites and the ten tribes through the fullness of the Gentiles. That’s through us. So there we have it. We have that commission to perform taking the gospel that we have received, the fullness of the gospel, when the Gentiles as a whole rejected, back to the House of Israel. Because just as the Gospel turned from the House of Israel and the Jews rejected it and went to the Gentiles as Paul took it to the Gentiles. So in the end time, the first shall be last and the last shall be first, that reverses itself and the Gentiles rejected it. And some of us, as the Apostle did, took it to the Gentiles originally, some of us among the Gentiles now take it back to the house of Israel, to the Jews and Lamanites and ten tribes. And we help them establish Zion on the earth, to which the Lord then can come. Think about Enoch’s Zion. Enoch established Zion first before the Lord came to Zion and came to live with this people in Zion. And so it is with the end-time servant of the Lord, the latter-day Enoch, so to speak, or latter-day John the Baptist, forerunner of the second coming of the Lord. It’s called the Servant in the Book of Isaiah. His roles are temporal roles, they’re not their messianic roles, but they’re temporal not spiritual like that of Christ. It’s clearly visible in the Book of Isaiah and in Jeremiah, a latter-day David. And in Ezekiel, David the Prince; he performs temporal roles that the Jews say are the gift; from Isaiah he reestablishes the kingdom of God on the earth. Prior to the coming of Jehovah, he builds a temple in Jerusalem. He gathers the 12 tribes, all as a preparatory work and establishes Zion among us. Among them, excuse me, among the house of Israel. And then the Lord can come to that Zion. And Zion is never established among Latter-Day Saints look in third Nephi as Jesus teachings, as established among them, among the house of us all that we helped him to establish. We are the spiritual kings and queens of the Gentiles. Those who have had the spiritual endowments and have kept the terms of that covenant and gone through our descent phases and our ascent phases and qualified them to minister the Gospel to the House of Israel as their temporal saviors, as Joseph was the savior to his brethren in Egypt. And since Ephraim is the birthright tribe. It has the responsibility of Joseph to be a savior of his brethren, to do that for the other 12 tribes, for the other 11 tribes, not including the 13 of the Levites. So there you have it. And you’ve got what are we supposed to do? What is our role? It’s all there in Isaiah and in the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon and Isaiah are just like two peas in a pod, you know. They parallel each other in so many instances, like Isaiah will prophesy nothing new save he bases it on something old. Some precedent in history that has happened that he uses as a type for an end-time event like a new Passover. And new wander in the wilderness and new Sodom and Gomorrah destruction. A new Garden of Eden. All of the 30 ancient events he predicts new versions of. And The Book of Mormon does the same thing. It takes their history and shows the patterns in their history that are going to repeat themselves in our day. They take their cue from Isaiah. And I just think these scriptures are glorious and marvelous. And those who’ve taken them lightly ought to seriously be rebuked, Meghan, Well, they will be. If they don’t get their act together, the Lord will surely rebuke them and their only condemnation if they take them lightly and not discover these things they need to be- we need- to make it our business to discover these things.
Meghan Farner: You shared a lot right there of really amazing things that I think many members of the church don’t know when it comes to our end time role and some of the things that the Lord has already put in place that Isaiah reveals that will be occurring or recurring again in the last days. And going back to the idea of the spiritual ladder to one of the biggest realizations that I feel like it’s shown for me is that the Lord doesn’t just need people to save in the last days. He needs people to also be saviors. And I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding that we have. I think that a lot of the times, because we are the quote unquote chosen people, the covenant members of the Lord’s kingdom on the earth today, that we tend to have perhaps a little bit of an entitlement, Thinking that we’re going to bring forth Zion and we’re going to escape a lot of the the trials and tribulations that will be forthcoming. And that’s not necessarily the case.
To be continued…
Want to listen to this episode? Listen here.
To see more of Avraham Gileadi’s work check out isaiahexplained.com
Resources:
The Book of Isaiah, Isaiah Institute Hebrew Translation
Isaiah’s Seven Levels of Spiritual Humanity
Isaiah’s Literary Structures
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